Hussein Ibish: "Snap judgments don't explicate much about where we are, and illuminate even less about where we're going..."

"There is an intellectually and politically indefensible rush to recast the leading Arab Islamist parties as more moderate or pluralistic than they actually are. Almost all of them remain Muslim Brotherhood or Salafist groupings, not Arab equivalents of European Christian Democratic parties or even the Turkish AKP. If constitutional restraints on government powers are strong, as they must be in any democracy, eventually some Arab Islamist groups will probably move in that direction, but they have not yet.

While there's no reason to think Islamists are in the process of consolidating absolute power anywhere, it's simply foolish not to recognize that they remain in every meaningful sense radical and retain their totalitarian impulses. That they would like to broadly and severely restrict the rights of individuals, women and minorities in the name of religion is obvious. It's hard to see them developing such unrestrained power, but there is also no use in kidding oneself about their evident intentions." Hussein Ibish- Jumping to conclusions on the Arab Spring